The editors over at Ten Ton Hammer have brought us another interview out of GamesCom, and this time it's a brief PvP-centered Q&A with Star Wars: The Old Republic associate lead designer Emmanuel Lusinchi. A snip:

TTH: Can you talk a little bit about PvP objectives?

Emmanuel Lusinchi: A little bit. So, we have different kinds of PvP. The one you're mentioning with objectives is the open-world PvP, I suppose. The world PvP: you queue for it and we try to match a similar amount of players. We scale your power to a certain extent that we prefer to match players of the same levels. We also want people to play PvP rather than wait forever for a match that is never going to come. We have a system of match-making that can match you with people who are not your level, but everybody is kind of boosted to level 50 power. We try to minimize its impact, but it's more about your skill rather than your level. Of course, the higher level the player, the more tools they have and they will have an advantage, but it won't be overwhelming which is important.

PvP is very important for some players and is a valid way of playing the game. You're spending time and are in the game. If we did not reward you in an equivalent manner if you were playing PvE, then you would be wasting your time. That would make it just so much harder for anyone to do PvP. So we give you experience, we give you credits, and we give you valor, which are unique skills that are administered in PvP and are not linked leveling in any way, but just how well you are doing in PvP. We give you tokens to let you buy various sets of PvP equipment at different levels. It's not every level, but there's a great level 20 set and there's a really great level 50 set. It's a good way to play the game if that's what you aim to. Of course, a player can just stay forever and only do that, but we think that there'll be more balance than that. They'll want to progress as a character through the story and do this as downtime, but it'll be up to the player.

Now, with open world PvP, we have objectives that can just happen naturally you run into players of another faction and you can just attack them, especially on PvP servers. But we also have special places where there are objectives. Fulfilling the objectives will give you some tokens as well, which are different from the warzone tokens. They can be exchanged for each other, but not a favorable rate so that we encourage you to do both forms of PvP, but we don't force you to do both forms of PvP. The reason why we have objectives in the open world for open world PvP is a) to focus the player as they know that there will players on the other side who is trying to do this objective, which is great. It's a big universe, where do you fight otherwise? Not only does it let us focus them, it allows us to focus them in the right way, because if you put every player on the server onto one spot, it never works very well for many reasons: technical, gameplay, visual effects. It spreads them though the clever design of objectives and the clever design of what you need to do. It gives us control, but it's also out of control because it's open world.